Regular commentator Mahkno has left a most interesting comment on the Peoria Pundit website that I’m going to shamelessly steal and quote in its entirety here:

Museum folks ran a very push orientated poll this eve. Had a good 30 second to full minute intro about how great the education benefits would be, how much revenue it would bring in (14 million), how many jobs it would create ([250] union jobs), its 86% paid for so far, and how low a burden it would be (25 cents per…).

Would you support a sales tax increase? Mmm no.

What if it were tied to other public service like firefighting and police? Mmmm… no.

What if the tax were only temporary, to expire at some point? LOL… Civic Center? … MMmmm No…

Done.

The statute under which this tax referendum falls is called the “Special County Retailers’ Occupation Tax For Public Safety, Public Facilities, or Transportation” (Sec. 5-1006.5). This statute has been around a while, actually, except that it used to be just for public safety and transportation. The legislature recently amended it to include “public facilities” for the expressed purpose of helping the museum project go forward.

Since the tax can cover not only facilities, but safety and transportation too, it looks like the county and museum officials are contemplating a common political strategy. It happens all the time in Congress. For instance, say you have a pork-barrel project that doesn’t stand a chance of getting through Congress on a pure up-or-down vote. What do you do? You put it in, say, a veterans hospital bill as an earmark. That way, in order to vote against the pork, representatives have to vote against veterans. No one wants to vote against veterans (and certainly no one wants to be on record as voting against veterans), so the bill passes, pork and all. Voila!

The county is at least contemplating the same strategy here. They have an unpopular sales tax referendum for an unpopular museum project, so how do they get residents to vote for it? Of course! Pair it with something people will be reluctant to vote against — like public safety! Who wants to vote against firefighters or police officers? Then they can market it as a public-safety tax instead of what it really is — a museum-funding tax.

Expect the museum-backers to pull out all the stops in this campaign. They’ve already started behind-the-scenes efforts to silence their critics (like me) through intimidation tactics. I suppose I should be flattered that my little blog is perceived as such a big threat.